The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

When jail time is already looming above your head after getting arrested for driving a truck load of hijacked booze, a normal person would restrain from trading even the bogus Nike, let alone the guns. But Eddie is not normal, neither are any of his friends.

I came across Eddie Coyle in a website, where in it claimed the loftiest spot under the heading Don Winslow’s top five crime novel’s. Being a huge fan of Don Winslow, I put aside every other book in my pipeline, and started reading it. Now I see the source of Don Winslow’s inspiration for his writing, especially his book Savages.  Both are path breaking books, in their own right.  

Eddie Coyle is an illicit fixer, who buys and supply guns to his buddies who are intended to do more than just use it for target practice.  Robbing bank is one of them. That puts Eddie in centre of the whole tale as it unravels.  

You may be too intimate to your friend to be hitting on his sister or swapping his underpants, but with the kind of shady deals being carried out between these friends, there will always be a danger of someone ratting someone, sometime or the other. Especially when you are in a fix as Eddie Coyle is in. Yeah, Eddie likes his friends, but he likes his freedom more, so he decides to rat out his gun dealer to his another friend, a sleazy detective cop named Dave Foley in exchange for his freedom.  But Eddie should have known better than to trust the cop. And it’s high time that he realized that all the while he had no friends at all, and after this, there won’t be any.

With eighty percent of the book steered forward with just the witty, authentic dialogues George V Higgins sets a very high bar for any crime writer to out do it.  It deserves all the praise it garnered over the years and three pages into it you will know the reason why it’s deemed as a major influence on every present day Crime writers. Having said that it’s not an easy book to read, being a multiple narrative; your brain needs to be into it, to determine who saying to whom.  

Of the lot, for reason unknown, the below scene is parked on top of my mind.

Eddie Coyle replaced the handset in the receiver carefully. He opened the door of the booth and found a stout woman, about fifty, staring at him. “It took you long enough,” she said.

“I was calling my poor sick mother,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, her face immediately relaxing into an expression of sympathy. “I’m sorry. Has she been ill long?”

Eddie Coyle smiled. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “ and the horse you rode in on.”

It’s a crime writing master piece, and any serious fan of crime writing should read it and as Dennis Lehane puts in his beautiful written introduction at the start of the book, raise the glass to Eddie Coyle. I would say raise the goddamn bottle to George V Higgins. 

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock

 KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock

 My grand old uncle, like the most of the characters in this book, never went past the proximity of his little village. Not even in his dreams. But living eighty years of his life within four kilometers radius of his tiny village, he has enough stories if not anything else to narrate to spend the entire night, and he would go on narrating relentlessly through the day as well. Provided you give him, regular dose of cheap rum now and then.  Well he is not the only one in that village, there are many such wicked story tellers too. Nothing surprising there, you go to any small rural village in India, there will be grand old men sitting under the banyan tree, their mouth pooled with tobacco, exchanging views, stories,  lime and beetle leaves.  He had a diverse range of stories from drunken rooster thief, to naked beggar girl roaming the streets, to a chenda (percussion instrument) player who never stops playing.  It’s not only weirdness of these stories that makes it interesting   but also the way in which he narrates.  

KNOCKEMSTIFF  by  Donald Ray Pollock is one such collection of grim, bizarre and eccentric stories, all taking place in a village named KNOCKEMSTIFF , Ohio. But this book requires a special mention because of its authenticity and grim portrayal of the rural life, with a very good usage of dark humor.  You take way the chuckle some, quick witted language and yet you have a very profound book about the desolation and loneliness.

The stories baring KNOCKEMSTIFF and PILLS is my favorite of the eighteen. The below line is form PILLS.

“Looking up, I saw the red blinking lights of an airliner, miles above me, heading west. I’d never been on a plane, but I imagined big-shot bastards on vacation, movie stars with beautiful lives. I wondered if they could see the glow of Frankie’s fire from up there. I wondered what they would think of us.” You can almost feel the hopelessness in this line.

Reading this book, I went back to the stories my uncle narrated and it’s a shame how such interesting things went up in the air, without anyone knowing about it other than his fellow, wrinkly friends. It’s really admirable the author decided to write this book, and decided to write it in humors and most casual way or he was just being completely realistic in his usage of language. Point to be also noted is that, there is no judgment passed to any of the characters in any of the stories inked in this book, no matter how freakish or surreal it may seem.

It’s not the characters inability to fulfill the dream, but inability to dream which makes this book more ironic and bleak. The aspirations, desire, hope lives and dies within the rustic countryside.

Overall this is a sincere, heartfelt and devilishly funny book. Easily five stars.

After spending couple of weeks in second book store in search of this book, I was forced to spend a small fortune to buy just the paperback. But hey! It’s worth every penny.

But I can imagine if my old man comes to know, he would say, “Hell Boy, you buy me quarter of OLD MONK for 40 bucks and I will provide with twice the more stories than your damn book.”